Category: Uncategorized
Assorted links
Police, Crime and the Usefulness of Economics
In 1994 the noted criminologist David Bayley wrote:
The police do not prevent crime. This is one of the best kept secrets of modern life. Experts know it, the police know it, but the public does not know it.
Economists were skeptical based on intuition but in truth the empirical work from economists at that time was mixed with some papers showing little or no effect of police on crime, just as Bayley argued. Since Levitt’s pioneering paper, however, there have been many papers applying a wide variety of more credible research designs like natural experiments, regression discontinuity, matching and other techniques. Any one of these papers is subject to criticism but as group the results have been remarkably consistent: police reduce crime with a 10% increase in police reducing property crime by about 3-4% and violent crime a little bit more perhaps by 4-5% (average elasticities of .35 and .48 from my review paper).
Two interesting new papers add to this literature. The University of Pennsylvania has a large private police force, some 100 officers who patrol the Penn campus and a substantial fraction of the surrounding neighborhood. The city police also police the Penn neighborhood but the UP police stay within a known (but not demarcated) region. Thus, there are more police on the Penn side of the border than on the other side. MacDonald, Kick and Grunwald apply regression discontinuity to look at what happens to crime around the border region and they find that it drops as one crosses the border. Their measures of the elasticity of crime with respect to police are similar to those found elsewhere in the literature.
Chalfin and McCrary take another approach. I always assumed that the reason standard (OLS) techniques do not pick up an effect of police on crime was reverse causality, places with a lot of crime also have a lot of police. Chalfin and McCrary argue that an even more serious problem may have been measurement error. The usual measure of police is produced by the FBI and the Uniform Crime Reports. CM find another measure produced by the Annual Survey of Governments. The two measures are close enough in levels but the relationship is surprisingly weak when looking at growth rates. Although we can’t say which measure is correct (or if either are correct) just knowing that they are different tells us that measurement error is important and measurement error will bias results downward (i.e. away from showing a significant effect of police on crime.) Moreover, if you know that measurement error exists it’s also possible to correct for it (surprisingly one can do this even without knowing the truth!) and when CM do this they find large and significant effects of police on crime, very much in line with earlier results. CM also show that there is lots of variability in police numbers that is not accounted for by crime so reverse causality is not as big a problem as one might imagine.
Using a range of reasonable elasticity estimates from the new literature and a back of the envelope calculation, Klick and I argue that it would not be unreasonable to double the number of police officers in the United States. At current levels, it’s also my belief that police are much more effective than prisons at reducing crime and with far fewer of the blowback effects. Chalfin and McCrary do a more detailed cost-benefit calculation for individual cities and they also find that many cities are severely underpoliced (and some are overpoliced–the police force of Richland County, South Carolina probably does not need a tank).
Estimates of the elasticity of crime with respect to police are largely consistent across many papers which suggests that the new techniques are more credible. The elasticity estimates are also important because their size implies that major changes in policy could improve social welfare. I see the empirical economics of crime as one of the more useful areas in economics in which substantial progress has been made in recent years.
Assorted links
1. Erik Voeten with some remarks toward a theory of treaties.
2. Milton Friedman on the popularity of the Fed.
3. What V.S. Naipaul thinks of Jane Austen.
4. New paper on Albert Hirschman and the World Bank, and Rajiv Sethi on Hirschman.
5. Further skepticism on productivity increases in U.S. manufacturing.
6. Raj Chetty video lectures on taxes and redistribution, not viewed but self-recommending.
Assorted links
1. Division of labor is limited by the extent of the market, impala and Oxpeckers edition.
2. Paper towels vs. air dryers.
3. The switch to capitalism was not the main cause of Russia’s mortality crisis.
Assorted links
1. Iris-scanning in the fight against Indian poverty.
2. Amazing Kreskin offers to fix the fiscal cliff.
3. An Edge talk with Philip Tetlock, and pre-registration for the forecasting website. Forecasters are needed for his very important project.
4. David Warsh on Shapley and other stuff.
5. Some catfish kill pigeons, and how good were cavemen as animal artists?
East German markets in everything
Communist East Germany not only put its political prisoners to work making Ikea furniture, it also sold the bodies of its sick citizens to Western pharmaceutical firms for testing their new products, a new television documentary has revealed.
Here is more, hat tip to Kit in Germany.
Assorted links
Assorted links
1. We should support rights for the Great Apes.
2. Good Greg Ip remarks on journalism and economics.
3. The cobra effect, and modern Florida and generalized.
4. Excerpts from an interview with me.
5. There is no great stagnation, soap bar edition.
Assorted links
1. Profile of James C. Scott, including on anarchism but not just.
2. Sex in cheese.
3. Camille Paglia, on women she does and does not like.
4. Has government funding of science become too conservative?
5. Which sector, other than punditry, is benefiting from the “fiscal cliff” chatter?
The Palestinian Emirates?
From Barry Shaw:, this is also known as the “eight-state solution”:
Dr. Mordechai Kedar of Bar-Ilan University, a Middle East expert…calls his alternative “the Palestinian Emirates.”
He visualizes eight emirate-type city states with designated borders that will incorporate the Arabs within them. The rest of the land can be populated by the inhabitants, whether they be Jews or Arabs, living and behaving with respect and deference to the inhabitants of the various city-states. The states shall be granted sovereignty. They shall be granted surrounding land for expansion and development. Road systems in vacant lands shall be developed for transport of people and commerce, both Jewish and Arab.
If Palestinians could “vote with their feet” across these various Emirates, it would be interesting to see what kind of policies would evolve, relative to what is produced by currently existing forms of political participation.
Here is a web site devoted to the concept, with one more detailed account here. I should add that there are versions of this idea which do not add all of the “baggage” found on this web site.
In presenting this material, I am not seeking to have MR commentators reprise all of the usual debates on the broader topic of Middle East peace or lack thereof. Nonetheless I had never heard this idea before, and so I am passing it along.
Assorted links
1. Garett Jones and the role of Fannie and Freddie.
2. The Bloomberg best books of the year list.
3. Rogoff comments on the stagnationists, and are we running out of phosphate reserves?
4, MIE: precious friends become precious gems.
5. Christmas video about macro, will offend some of you. Worth a view in any case! By John Popola, and it considers Malthus on aggregate demand.
6. Outcompeting the driverless car (does the theory of comparative advantage apply to dogs?), caveat emptor.
Does the theory of comparative advantage apply to horses?
And if not, why not? Where exactly does the model fail to apply to our equine friends?
Beginning in the late 19th century, and with increasing mechanization in the 20th century, especially following World War I in the USA and after World War II in Europe, the popularity of the internal combustion engine, and particularly the tractor, reduced the need for the draft horse. Many were sold to slaughter for horsemeat and a number of breeds went into significant decline.
The link for that is here, and for the pointer I thank Braden Anderson.
What I’ve been reading
1. Rwanda, Inc., by Patricia Crisafulli and Andrea Redmond. The positive story on that country, though I don’t buy it, given that the broader region still is not close to peace. Governance problems will do them in.
2. Bernard Bailyn, The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675. It is stunningly good, not just “stunningly good for a 90-year-old.”
3. Bee Wilson, Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat. The first 61% of this book, as measured by Kindle, is fascinating and superbly original. The rest is a well-done retread of other intelligent popular food books. That is for me a high ratio of excellent to good.
4. Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds: A Novel. Everyone else loved it, though for me it was too impressionistic. Call it my fault.
5. Benoit Peeters, Derrida: A Biography. An excellent book, though I find it hard to care. Easier than reading Derrida, and the author doesn’t make the mistake of trying to tell you what Derrida is all about.
I have not yet seen a copy of Erik Angner, A Course in Behavioral Economics, but perhaps it is of interest.
Mustache markets in everything
…not all mustaches are created equal, and in recent years, increasing numbers of Middle Eastern men have been going under the knife to attain the perfect specimen.
Turkish plastic surgeon Selahattin Tulunay says the number of mustache implants he performs has boomed in the last few years. He now performs 50-60 of the procedures a month, on patients who hail mostly from the Middle East and travel to Turkey as medical tourists.
He said his patients generally want thick mustaches as they felt they would make them look mature and dignified.
“For some men who look young and junior, they think (a mustache) is a must to look senior … more professional and wise,” he said. “They think it is prestigious.”
Here is more and for the pointer I thank Michael Wellhouse. And to overcome the shortage of collateral:
Men swore on their mustaches in sayings and folk tales, used them as collateral for loans and guarantees for promises, and sometimes even shaved their opponents’ lips as a punishment.
Assorted links
1. Legal precedents for charter cities?
2. Edward Conard on Warren Buffett.
3. Venkatesh responds to the NYT.
4. The Memory Palace works in virtual environments.
5. Take a trampoline in to your workplace (there is no great stagnation).